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School/camp offers struggling kids a summer of new possibilities

A unique program with a "social inclusion strategy” gives marginalized youth a chance to break free of a cycle that leads to trouble, crime and even death.

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A look at YAAACE Summer Institute located in Toronto's Jane and Finch area. Summer programming helping Toronto's at-risk youth with in preparation to the following school year.(Tara Walton/ Toronto Star)

Devon Jones walks briskly through the halls of C.W. Jefferys Collegiate, suddenly pausing to berate a summer camp counsellor for combing his hair as he walks past.

“You can’t bring those ’hood habits to work,” he says gently. “I’m not trying to get at you, but the little ones, they see it and they’ll do it, too.”

The teenager pockets the comb. Jones shakes his head.

“It’s about breaking the cycle,” he explains.

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The cycle, he says, is one that begins with young people being marginalized and academically underachieving. It ends in them dropping out of school, “getting in conflict with the law and maybe meeting an untimely death.”

Octavia Beckles, a York Region board teacher during the regular school year, shares a laugh with a young student while teaching math in the summer program at C.W. Jefferys Collegiate Institute. (Tara Walton / Toronto Star) | Order this photo

Dance instructor Chante Clarke leads a group of girls through a choreographed dance routine as part of the YAACE program.
(Tara Walton / Toronto Star) | Order this photo

Octavia Beckles provides some one-on-one teaching during a math lesson in the program, aimed at helping at-risk youth keep up with their peers at school over the long summer break. (Tara Walton / Toronto Star) | Order this photo

Students at the YAACE Summer Institute review their days of the week in a classroom at C.. Jefferys Collegiate. (Tara Walton / Toronto Star) | Order this photo

“Since Jordan Manners was shot at this school in May 2007, there have been 97 homicides of (youth aged 21 and younger) in the city,” he notes. “It’s hard to watch. That’s worrisome.”

It’s why Jones, a veteran teacher in the Jane-Finch area, started a summer camp through the Youth Association for Academics, Athletics and Character Education seven years ago.

It runs on what he calls a “social inclusion strategy,” to intervene early with a group of low-income elementary school kids recommended to the program by their teachers, social workers or by Jones himself.

“We want to bring them in from the periphery of society to the middle,” he says.

It starts with getting the kids involved in activities from basketball to music and technology.

But a key part is education.

These are the kids that, in many cases, have fallen through the cracks of the school system, he says

The seven-week camp helps bridge the summer achievement gap that sees students from lower-income, less-educated families lose literacy and math skills over the long break, while their more privileged peers improve. For the first time this year, the camp is being run under the TDSB.

“We’re hoping to infuse these young people with as much capacity and aptitude as possible,” says Jones. “We want to give them viable alternatives to guns, gangs and drugs.”

A glimpse inside

The 140 kids that wake the sleepy corridors of the Jane-Finch area school in July are quiet and shy.

By the Monday morning of the program’s last week, the campers greet their counsellors cheerily as they arrive, though attendance is lower than usual. Some hug Heather Mark or toy with the program coordinator’s hair as they trail in.

Soon the school echoes with splashing from the pool, music from the dance studio and the sharp thuds of basketballs from the gym — while in the classrooms, with eight TDSB teachers, less traditional camp activities are going on.

In Jamea Zuberi’s class, the Grades 4 to 6 boys are rattling off the names of countries in Africa before watching a film about Nelson Mandela.

In Ardavan Eizadridad’s classroom, the Grade 2 to 3 kids are reading in small groups in a classroom adorned with class projects about love and empathy.

In Kisrene McKenzie’s classroom, the kindergarteners and Grade 1s are practising counting using straws.

When the camp first began, basketball was the main event. But Jones soon realized that the kids the camp targets — predominantly black, and often from low-income, single-parent families around the GTA — needed academic help just as much as sports.

In the assessments conducted at the start of the camp, the kids are typically reading at a level two or more grades behind where they should be, he says. By the end of the program, many are up to par going into the new school year.

In between, they get to go to the zoo and Wild Water Kingdom, and get lessons in how to make video games from Microsoft.

Three of Tiare Allimant’s children are in the program. Dropping her youngest daughter off at lunchtime, Allimant says the program has helped her children academically — and that they enjoy learning more here than they do in regular school.

“I notice my sons are doing much better in math. When they go back to school in September, they’re not clueless to what’s going on because they’ve been exercising their brains all summer,” she says. “One of my sons, in a full class when a teacher is teaching, he doesn’t pick it up. But when you explain it to him in a different way, he understands it better. The teachers are pretty firm with the work, too. It keeps a lot of the kids out of trouble in the summer.”

Many of the kids who started out as campers are now among the 38 counsellors — such as Brianne Cohen and Ashley Cain. The 17-year-olds, who hope to get offers to play basketball at universities in the U.S., have been assigned to the Grades 4 to 6 girls.

“You see a lot of improvement,” says Cain, who recalls how the summer camp kept her own schoolwork on track. “If I didn’t come to camp that summer, I would have gotten fat,” laughs Cohen. “I ate and ate, then we came to camp and played basketball and went swimming, so I got into shape.”

‘Agressively pro-social’

In the afternoon, there’s an additional class for a group of 15- to 18-year-olds handpicked by Jones. Their program, which is literacy-focused, is more “aggressively pro-social.”

“Those are kids who are really at risk. It doesn’t get more volatile than that,” says Jones. “Two kids in the program were expelled from three schools last year.”

His criterion for admission is “a young person who is on a trajectory to be in contact with the criminal justice system or an untimely death. A kid who I worry won’t make it to their 18th birthday.”

Samuel Egonu runs the class, which touches on subjects from the workings of the criminal justice system (and the consequences of getting caught in it) to the impact of drugs and alcohol on health, to black male stereotypes and the “normalizing gaze” as seen through the Tupac Shakur film Juice.

Other days, it’s the philosophies of Gandhi, the Trayvon Martin trial and the challenges faced by First Nations groups in Canada. They practise public speaking (a great way to be daring without causing harm, says Egonu) and reading out loud.

By the end of the camp, the class had learned how to develop a business plan — ending with a trial run of their own funnel-cake business.

“We learn things that are important to us,” says one 16-year-old, after describing the idea behind “Tropical Tunnel Cakes.”

“It’s about getting their minds open. Seeing the world beyond their block. They have limits in their lives, whether they put them there or someone else did,” says Egonu. “This gives them hope. And it gives them tools they didn’t have, so they have no more excuses. You have one less reason to pick up a gun and rob somebody due to the frustration that you can’t go anywhere in society.”

Egonu designed the curriculum he uses at the camp while he was in prison. He founded the non-profit 180 Change Street when he got out in 2008.

“The mayor may not believe in hug-a-thug programs,” he adds. “But sometimes, damn right they need a hug.”

Jones isn’t sure what impact the class will have, whether it will change the life trajectory he dreads.

“It’s God’s work at this point,” he sighs. But that is no reason not to try.

Work that’s never done

The end of summer campdoesn’t mean the end of academic intervention for some of the younger kids.

“We’re not done,” says Jones. In a new “weekend academy” program starting at the end of September, teachers-in-training will continue to work with some of the kids who are really struggling.

“We’ll micro-manage them,” he says.

For the rest, Jamea Zuberi hopes they will take boosted confidence in their abilities into their classrooms across the city, come the start of school.

“This sounds like a miracle place,” says Zuberi, who is the other program co-ordinator and a TDSB teacher for 18 years. But, she adds “it’s important to keep this space real.”

“We have them for seven weeks out of 52. Do we fix these kids in seven weeks? No. Do we see some changes? Yes,” she says. “We set high expectations, which we hope will become habits over time. So they go back to school and remember, ‘This is what I can do,’” she says.

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